The present invention relates to a method of renovating and recycling vehicles such as automobiles.
Automobiles art required quite high reliability and thus the designed lifetime of the automobiles tends to be excessively long. As a result, usual automobiles may have no operational problems at all when they are disused due to little user needs for them.
On the other hand, manufacturing xe2x80x9cdisposablexe2x80x9d automobiles having a designed lifetime corresponding to a relatively short interval of the user""s car-changing cycle may oppose the nowadays trend because such a manufacturing approach does not meet the social requirements of effectively recycling the material to reduce the total amount of discarded waste.
In order to deal with such problems, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-348855 has proposed a method of recycling a disused automobile in that the disused automobile is carried by a loop-type carrier suspended by a hanger, and while the automobile is slowly conveyed through a plurality of stations, parts detached from the disused automobile are divided into to-be-recycled parts and unusable parts and stored accordingly, and the vehicle body is processed by pressing, shearing, etc.
However, this method is just a flow-processing of a conventional one-by-one disused automobile dismantling process mainly carried out manually, and thus cannot sufficiently fulfil the social requirements of effective use of recycled materials and reduction in the total amount of discarded waste.
In view of such problems of the prior art, a primary object of the present invention is to provide a vehicle renovating and recycling method that can satisfy the user""s demand of changing cars at short intervals while not opposing the effective usage of resources.
A second object of the present invention is to provide a vehicle renovating and recycling method that can ensure that substantially all the parts of the vehicle are recycled appropriately to thereby eliminate or considerably reduce the discarded waste.
A third object of the present invention is to provide a vehicle renovating and recycling method that can avoid manufacturing the vehicle with excessively high quality and reduce the vehicle manufacturing cost.
A fourth object of the present invention is to provide a vehicle renovating and recycling method that allows the vehicle to be disassembled and recycled at shorter period of time and lower cost.
According to the present invention, such objects can be accomplished by providing a method of renovating and recycling a vehicle, comprising the steps of: (a) designing the vehicle, wherein the step of designing comprises the steps of: (a-1) determining a way of treatment, such as melting, crushing or renovating, for each part of the vehicle; and (a-2) designing each part of the vehicle so as to form an easily disassemblable structure; (b) manufacturing the vehicle according to the design made in the step (a); (c) selling the vehicle with a limited usable period; (d) having the sold vehicle returned after the limited usable period has lapsed; (e) separating parts of the returned vehicle into those to be reused and those to be replaced with new parts; and (f) separating the to-be-replaced parts into those to be renovated or those to be processed into materials.
In this way, since the way of treatment for each part of the vehicle is predetermined at the design stage, it is ensured that all the parts can be properly recycled, to thereby substantially eliminate the discarded waste.
In view of facilitating disassembly of eh vehicle, it will be preferable if the step (a-2) comprises a step of modularzing some of the parts into one or more modules so that the pars in each module can be detached as a batch. According to preferred embodiment of the invention, the modules comprise an engine module, door module and instrument panel module.
Further preferably, the step (a-2) comprises the step of designing each pan of the vehicle so that part, to be treated differently can be detached from each others This ensures that each part can be treated independently from other parts so that each part is treated in a way most appropriate to recycle the same.
The design step (a) may further comprise the step of: (a-3) setting a lifetime for each part based on the limited usable period of the vehicle. In this way, it is possible to set an optimum designed lifetime (durability) for each parts to thereby prevent the total quality of the vehicle from being excessively high and reduce the vehicle manufacturing cost. Owing to the predetermined limited period of use of the vehicle, the user can use the vehicle with high reliability substantially without having to take care of daily maintenance.
In such a case, it is possible that in the step (e), the parts are separated depending on the set lifetime of each part. In this way, a personnel can judge whether a part should be reused or replaced with a new one without carefully inspecting the part, to thereby reduce an effort and time for separating the detached parts of the vehicle. It is also possible, however, that in the step (e), the parts are separated additionally depending on a state of use of each part.